When you take a look at Arcadia, you see what it truly is. Some may see it as home, others a battleground, but at the end of the day, it’s still the same: a cage. We’re all kept behind the doors, trapped inside for others to display. And then it becomes clear, more visible than what anyone else can see. The glass and iron bars that surround us all, the specific layers that build our home.

Arcadia is a zoo, and we’re the animals.

It makes a frightening amount of sense. We live in different boxes, left to be observed. We’re sorted by wealth and rarity, duty and habitat, by the food we eat and where we have kids. And as time as shown again, there are those beyond us that watch, monitor, and change things on their own whims.

But now, violence for violence rules us, reducing everyone into little more than beasts. Preservationists and Seekers, herbivores and carnivores, predator and prey. Into the stage they throw all of us, and for their amusement we tear each other apart. The spectacle increases, the stampede grows larger, but there’s nowhere for it to go apart from each other.

So on and on, the rats run the race as the cats watch and feed off the disarry.

But this isn’t my first time in a zoo.

I’ve been on the hunt this whole time for the Keeper, keeping on a track that seems like a downward path of chaos. I’ve come to clash again and again with both sides, seen the monsters and the beasts of Arcadia in the face and withstood all of them. And in turn, I learned. I adapted. I changed.

For in a ring full of beasts, it takes a human to succeed.

One has to be smarter than the creatures around them. You can’t wrestle a rhinoceros, but you can be clever enough to trap it. My jaws and claws don’t match that of a lion prowling, but you keep on your toes and they never catch you. Be faster, be hungrier, but be smarter and you take home the key victory: survival.

Survival of the fittest isn’t about the strongest, the fastest, or the meanest. It’s about how adaptable you are.

As time has gone, I’ve faced near everyone that could show up in that ring. I’ve gone toe to toe with monsters and monarchs, heroes and villains, madmen and saints alike. And each time, I’ve learned something. Seen how with everyone, the lock intertwines to seal Pandemonium away in the cage that is Arcadia is.

Then I changed. Adapted myself to tbe the one solution that allows me to escape where all others will remained tied down. Forged myself from the raw, bloody clay that I once was, and turned myself into the key.
The key to open the cage.

The key to where the Keeper is.

The key to victory.

For violence is the shackle of beasts in a zoo, and I will be free.